ImmunoGel to treat immunotherapy-resistant cancer
Year
2023
Project team
Giovanni Traverso with Avik Som, Jan-Georg Rosenboom and Eric Wehrenberg
80%
of cancer patients do not respond to systemic immunotherapy
Intratumoral
drugs often fail
Polymeric drug delivery
could overcome challenges
A personalized cancer vaccine
Systemic immunotherapy is often used to treat cancer, but 80 percent of patients do not respond to it. A new paradigm calls for injecting drugs directly into a tumor to “teach” the immune system and trigger a systemic response to widespread disease. However, current approaches for intratumoral drugs and their clinical trials often fail. This team is developing “ImmunoGel,” a polymeric drug delivery platform for intratumoral immunoadjuvants. This approach would allow controlled and extended drug release and enable clinician tracking of delivery.